First Love

In Brief: The name Deanna Durbin may not be immediately familiar to today’s audiences, but she practically carried Universal Pictures single-handedly between 1936 and 1941 — and she remained one of their biggest stars until she retired from movies in 1949. She had an operatic voice and was that rarest of things: a completely appealing and non-cloying child star. First Love was a huge deal in 1939, presenting Durbin in her first adult role and getting her first screen kiss, from newcomer Robert Stack. It also turned out to be one of her best — possibly the very best — films.  The story is a modern variant on Cinderella told in terms of a screwball romantic comedy. And it’s amazingly adept at being a screwball comedy while being almost giddily romantic, striking just the right note in both capacities. Perhaps no child star ever made such a seamless transition to adult movies, but then Durbin was no ordinary child star. It helped immensely that Universal surrounded her with seasoned players who knew the ropes when it came to comedy, especially Eugene Pallette, who had played a similar role to the one he has here in My Man Godfrey (1936). Also on hand is the great Kathleen Howard — a former opera star best known to movie fans as W.C. Fields’ loud and domineering wife in It’s a Gift (1934) and The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935) — as Durbin’s sharp-tongued but sympathetic music professor. If you’ve never seen a Deanna Durbin movie, there’s no better place to start.